Jobs

VIVO Technical Lead

Background

Are you ready to join an open source software community that’s transforming the landscape for open scholarship? VIVO’s mission is to provide world-class open source software, standard data ontologies, linked open data, and services to our world-wide member institutions. VIVO is at the forefront of a rapidly emerging infrastructure for integrating and sharing information about researchers and scholars and their activities and outputs so as to promote data sharing, attribution, and teamwork within and across institutions. The outcome is a platform that enables discovery across a distributed network of institutions worldwide.

VIVO seeks a dynamic, creative, and innovative Technical Lead for the project. The VIVO Technical Lead will play a major role in a movement that will shape the future of scholarly discovery and collaboration. The VIVO Technical Lead is a full-time position. Working collaboratively with the VIVO Project Director, accountable to the VIVO Steering Group, and employed by the non-profit DuraSpace organization, the Technical Lead will enable the VIVO community to accomplish its goals by fulfilling the following responsibilities:

Overview of Responsibilities

The VIVO Technical Lead will be responsible for providing leadership, technical guidance, coordination, and support to the open source community in its work to maintain, enhance, and evolve the VIVO software and ontology, and to integrate community-produced apps and tools. The Technical Lead will ensure that the VIVO software products fulfill the mission and strategic direction of the project and the needs of community members. Additionally, the Technical Lead will lead the effort to ensure that VIVO implementation tools and application interfaces are made user-friendly and provide value “out of the box.”

The Technical Lead will foster an inclusive, welcoming, and open team environment, based on a meritocracy of committers, contributors, ontologists, documentation specialists, technical trainers, and other volunteer contributors. S/he will recruit new members to the team from the larger community of volunteers. S/he will organize events such as hackathons, training sessions, implementation fests, and the like to provide multiple on-ramps for new contributors.

The Technical Lead will organize development sprints and team meetings that are oriented towards incorporating all the work of the project – core development, apps and tools creation, ontology work, documentation, etc. – into an established release schedule.

S/he will attend VIVO Steering Group, Leadership Group, and Management Team meetings. The Technical Lead, working in partnership with the Project Director, will oversee a process of eliciting and documenting new use cases that will be gathered from the VIVO membership. The process will include steps for surveying the community on feature priorities and will culminate in a published, evolving roadmap of future work that aligns with the VIVO strategic plan and value proposition.

S/he will coordinate technology activities among the Implementation, Development, Applications and Tools, Ontology, and Community Engagement Working Groups; identify, document, and communicate dependencies between working groups; and identify solutions to enhance cross-working group collaborations. The Technical Lead will provide support to technology Task Forces and will monitor their progress.

S/he will provide oversight and coordination of VIVO architecture work and ensure that VIVO core code, ontology, and applications and tools meet open standards; will work with the community to support ontology improvements, integrate community extensions and deliver applications and tools as tested optional extensions to VIVO; maintain code base infrastructure; and coordinate release management and testing activities.

S/he will work collaboratively with developers and stakeholders to create and maintain a technical roadmap and will collaborate on strategic planning. S/he will develop an understanding of the impact of technical decisions on budgets, timelines, and the sustainability of the VIVO open source project.

The Technical Lead will act as a technology spokesperson for VIVO, speaking and giving presentations at meetings, conferences, and other events.

To Apply: Send a cover letter and resume to jobs@duraspace.org. Screening of applications will commence immediately and continue until the position is filled.

DuraSpace is an independent 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization providing leadership and innovation for open technologies that promote durable, persistent access to digital data. We collaborate with scholarly, scientific, cultural, and technology communities by supporting open source projects and creating services to help ensure that current and future generations have access to our collective digital heritage.

DuraSpace is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness. We offer a competitive salary and benefits package, a work-from-home lifestyle, and a supportive peer group. Significant travel is expected.